Although not as well known today, Minor White, was a highly influential photographer and teacher in mid-twentieth century photography. He more than anyone was responsible for the practice in photography called the Equivalent Tradition. The term equivalent was first coined by Alfred Stieglitz, one of Minor White’s greater influences along with Edward Weston. But Minor White is credited with expanding upon Stieglitz’s idea of the equivalent. There is an episode White describes in his diary, Memorable Fancies, in which he describes speaking with Stieglitz just after his return from WW II. At this point White is a young photographer just back from war and Stieglitz is the grand master of Modern Art and a  highly regarded photographer. White describes sitting on a radiator and discussing picture making with Stieglitz and at one point Stieglitz says something about the ability of photography to make visible the invisible:

…and something else about true things being able to talk to each other. His talk itself was a kind of equivalent, that is his words were not related to the sense he was making. If anyone had ever talked like that to me before, I certainly had not heard him. 

After a few minutes of this sort of talk White has an emotional and transformative experience where Stieglitz is able to; “break open the lump of poured concrete” inside of him. “Have you ever been in love?…Then you can photograph”.

I always like telling that anecdote when trying to explain the notion of equivalence in photography. In many ways it gets to the essence of the idea. It seems that there is a swirl of activity at Soho Photo around this idea of the equivalent and there is even talk of hanging a show in the fall. And so in this and the next few posts I will try to lay out my understanding of the idea of equivalence in photography.

An equivalent is not a thing it is a function.

Isaac and Lucie

I don’t think I ever really, at a visceral level, understood Stiegltz’s “Have you ever been in love” statement until recently. I had an intellectual understanding of it and the idea of equivalence but it wasn’t until my 8 year old son made friends with a girl named Lucie at his school a couple of years ago that it really hit me. Lucie and Isaac have this special relationship where they just liked being with each other pure and simple.That’s it, nothing more. At one point we were all at the beach, Lucie and her parents and Isaac with me and my wife and daughter. Lucie and Isaac were gamboling in the surf and just seeing them together, happy just to be, with no further desires or expectations, affected me much the same way Stieglitz’s words to Minor White affected him. I wanted to capture that feeling and so I took out my Mamiya 6 and started to shoot but halfway through I realized that what I was getting on film was just two very happy kids. Then I remembered a photograph I made years ago, an abstract of ice on a lake, and that photograph (and that memory of the photograph) became an equivalent of what I was feeling.

Two Spirits, ©2012 Dave Ortiz

An equivalent is a process. It’s an experience. Any photograph regardless of source might function as an Equivalent to someone, somewhere, sometime. Equivalence in photography really refers to what is going on in the viewers mind. According to Minor White, equivalency functions on the assumption that the following equation is factual:

Photograph + Person Looking Mental Image

In the next post I would like to talk about working in the equivalent tradition. For now I leave you with some words from Minor White:

While rocks were photographed, the subject of the sequence is not rocks; while symbols seem to appear, they are pointers to the significance. The meaning appears in the space between the images, in the mood they raise in the beholder. The flow of the sequence eddies in the river of his associations as he passes from picture to picture. The rocks and the photographs are only objects upon which significance is spread like sheets on the ground to dry.

from the series; Personal Ecologies ©2012 Dave Ortiz

Landscape is related to, but not identical with, nature. Nature is a part of every landscape, but is no more than a part of any landscape which has felt the impact of man. In this view landscape is always inclusive of man and nature, rather than a way of distinguishing, or at least emphasizing, nature, as is still not uncommon in some fields, such as art and earth science. Indeed, the idea of landscape runs counter to recognition of any simple binary relationship between man and nature. Rather, it begins with a naive acceptance of the intricate intermingling of physical, biological, and cultural features which any glance around us displays. Landscape is, first of all, the unity we see, the impressions of our sense rather than the logic of the sciences.

Asbury Park, NJ ©2012 Dave Ortiz

Seeing that there will be an atelier at Soho Photo where members will come to talk about street photography, I though I might post this link to Eric Kim’s list of the 10 best street photography blogs. The blogs that I am familiar with on the list certainly deserve to be there (Burn Magazine, B, American Suburb X, La Pura Vida) and the others seem to be worthy of checking out to say the least. Enjoy!

Stars, © 2012 Dave Ortiz

As a photo editor for a well known “Nature” magazine I discovered that nature photographers were either animal photographers or landscape photographers. They are both very different ways of working with your camera. I think something similar can be said about street photographers. There are photographers who concentrate on people (Gary Winogrand) and those that concentrate on the urban space, Naoya Hateyakama’s work comes to mind (just to get out of the NYC area). I’ll admit it is easier for street photographers to do both types of photography than it is for the nature photographers to switch between wildlife and landscape photography.

As I was shooting for my “Imaginary Polaroids” series I noticed that at the beginning my emphasis was on people but by the end I was usually photographing things and scenery.  The images were more about things in my head than about things out there. I guess I have been looking at too many contemporary Japanese photographers like Rinko Kawauchi and Masafumi Sanai. So I guess what I am getting at is that I would like to take street photographs that are a little more introspective and not the “shoot from the hip” school of street photography. Imagine Atget in color or maybe Aaron Siskind.

UPDATE: Check out this TED Talk that clearly outlines what is at stake with SOPA and PIPA: http://www.aphotoeditor.com/2012/01/19/sopa-and-photography/

Unless you have been sleeping in a cave you will probably have heard about the internet protests today against the SOPA and PIPA legislations that are set to be taken up in Congress. Many prominent websites have shut down for the day. Others, including WordPress (Yay!) offer up more symbolic protests. I would like to offer my own personal protest. Inaction on my part though is out of the question. The invisible, the voiceless, do not have anything to withhold in the public sphere.

Since the central idea in both SOPA and PIPA is a heavy handed defense of intellectual property that overwhelming benefits the big Corporations, I thought I would take a page out of the Hippie protest handbook, otherwise known as Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman, and put up one of my images and ask that you appropriate, err, steal the image and put it up wherever you like. You might even want to (digitally) scrawl your own protest message on it. Send it to your Congress person if you can’t think of anything to do with it!

I guess yesterday’s image will work well. Lots of open space in this image for the free expression of ideas. Plus it’s a nice metaphor.

© Free

Jersey Shore Moonrise, ©2012 Dave Ortiz

Usually in January it’s cold and windy and while I might go outside to photograph it usually is not for the same amount of time as I do in the other seasons of the year. Whereas in August or September I’ll be out for five or six hours, in January and February I’ll be out only one or two hours shooting unless something really interesting is happening, like Chinese New Year celebrations in Chinatown. In the colder months I usually get a lot of scanning done. Although I am ready to give up on film and go digital. Yes, my little Lumix has convinced me. Plus the fact that I sandwich my negatives between glass before inserting into the scanner which creates the perfect environment for lots of dust to get into your scan and then the amount time retouching in Photoshop – ugh. I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Nikon D800. I hope I will not be disappointed.

My series, Dominion, which is part of the Personal Ecologies umbrella I am filing my landscape work under will probably be my last, all film project. Don’t hold me to that though! January has been unseasonable mild and so I have been out shooting rather than scanning film but this past Friday and Saturday it was quite cold. So I decided to stay in and edit the 100 or so sheets of negatives left to go through for this series. I edited a previous hundred or so earlier in order to submit some work to The Aperture Portfolio Prize. I have not heard anything and so I am assuming I am out of the running for this prize (if I was ever in the running). I started with the dozen or so rolls I took at the Jersey Shore on January 1 (I didn’t spend all my time photographing the Polar Bears) and in early December and I came across this image. I immediately knew that I would use this as my opening image. I love when that happens. When you have thought enough about the meaning of the pictures and the narrative that you want to tell that you can lay that first stone on the path to a completed photo project. Mind you this has been in the works for 2-3 years. Yes, I work slowly. I’ll put up one or two additional beach pictures to get you through the cold weather tomorrow.

Blue Purse, ©2012 Dave Ortiz

One of the nice things about working digitally is that you have such great control over color. Ansel Adams would have flipped if he saw the amount of control we have over color printing presently. Adams did a lot of work in color and even foresaw the use of computers in photography.

In my image processing I will sometimes lower the saturation of the photo as a whole and then adjust a specific color or pick an area of the photograph and refine the color  so that an idea comes across or relationships within the photograph becomes clear. Color is emotion, color is ideas, colors can be the subject of a photograph. In the above image, reality and fiction duke it out in blue.

Hungarian Pastry Shop, NYC ©2012 Dave Ortiz

Aside from light, the thing that most captures my attention when I am shooting on the street is background. I will often come upon a great background, sort of like yesterday’s picture, and then I kind of hang around in front of the scene and see if anything interesting happens. I also just shoot the background too, just in case. Sometime I linger for 15 minutes or so, again as in yesterday’s photograph or it could all be over within a matter of seconds as was the case with this photo. In a world ruled by chaos, chance favors the prepared photographer!

© Dave Ortiz 2012

Yesterday I spent my lunch hour glued to my monitor watching the announcement of the Fuji X1 Pro live. Can’t wait to try it out. It is going to sell out fast. But after missing my daily walk yesterday I took an extra long one today with my camera in hand.  I decided to do some street shooting to keep my street senses well honed. Since I don’t have any new projects under way (I am trying to get Personal Ecologies into some sort of Portfolio) I thought I would just take the winter to walk and shoot in the streets. I’ll post my favorites here regularly under the rubric of “streetwerk”!.Yeah I know it is not spelled correctly nor is it even a real word. I made it up. So wacha gonna do about it?! Oops, sorry. I got carried away with my street persona!

©2012 Dave Ortiz

Like most photographers, I am a self professed camera geek (nuf said) and with the advent of Kodak going bankrupt I started looking more seriously for a digital camera that would be just as beloved as my Panasonic Lumix but also had a large image sensor (for all the obvious reasons). For the past few months I have been keeping watch on when Nikon would announce the upgrade to their D700. Why Nikon? I have a boat load of Nikkor lenses plus I like their sensor’s color rendition a little better than Canon’s.

While on the website; Nikon Rumors, I saw an announcement of Fujifilm’s latest mirrorless camera, the X-Pro 1. At first sight I thought it looked a lot like my beloved Contax G2 (the article says as much also). Imagine that, a digital G2, Wow! The great thing about it (besides it being a rangefinder with Fuji’s great Hybrid viewfinder design) is that the sensor is APS size. That’s pretty big for a mirrorless camera (magnification factor of  x1.5, the same as Nikon’s DX format cameras).

I actually bought and used Fuji’s X100 camera and was pretty impressed with the image quality, build and the viewfinder. It was just too slow to use on the street’s of New York. I missed many shots waiting for the camera to wake up. But when it worked – it worked. See image at the top of this post (yes, I know, a pale imitation of a great Paul Graham photograph!). It looks like Fuji  is coming up fast as a contender in the digital camera market, something to consider besides a Nikon or Canon. I am hoping that Fuji has done away with the X100′s quirks. If they do I will be the first one on line to buy one. It’s expensive about 1500 euros for the body and the “normal” lens. They have two other lenses for the camera, a wide angle and a tele macro. Right, unlike the X100 this camera has interchangeable lenses!  Wow indeed!

Tomorrow Nikon makes it’s long awaited product announcements. I’ll be checking out Nikon Rumors to see what Nikon has in store. Fuji will announce the X-Pro-1 on Tuesday.

UPDATE: News on the Nikon D800!